Old Dragonslayer is a deck that uses the ornstein model. I *think* it's in the core game expansion?
Also they haven't said anything about any of the bosses in the expansions being mini bosses. The only new mini boss is an alternative ruleset for the Asylum demon.

Yeah, the initial balance without mimics and invaders to help fill out your soul wallet is a bit rough. I tuned it down some in the mean time by making a base deck that only has items that require 3 upgrades or less, plus embers and shards. That way one character ought to end up with an upgrade by the time you hit the mini boss.

That is correct, New Years will only eat four weeks of time. They expect to have the bosses (which seem to all be at the next to last approval stage) ready to ship the distro hubs just after the holiday. So those get put on the boats in March. Then if it's like with the base game, the components get boxed in Europe and sent to the hubs, which I guess is the 3 month turn around on that.

In fact I did miss that!
I shall do it that way next time and see how it feels in play versus this mostly stock run. My usual D&D game was cancelled and the fall back of Pandemic Legacy didn't happen either so I figured that was a good time to break this out and give it a little go before Wave 2 finally appears from the Mysts of Avalon, so I fully admit to doing things wrong by accident instead of on purpose.

As well as this is a fairly easy to modify game. The base game speeds up a ton just by sorting out the stuff that takes more than 3 levels for at least one class to wear. Pretty much cuts the deck in half and removes the lack of fun from pulling something that needs 20+ souls to wear from every pull. From there if you want to make it less like Shining Force/Fire Emblem and more like Dark Souls it's a few easy changes.